‘The Rain’ on Netflix Season Finale Recap: The Lone Wolf Dies, But the Pack Survives

“We’re a group. We stick together. I’m not leaving without you.” A lot of things happen in the season finale of The Rain, but this is the thing that matters. When Simone refuses to leave the heavily guarded Apollon compound — the very place she’s been struggling to get to all season, only to discover it’s a deathtrap run by a company full of sociopaths — without her friends, she encapsulates the argument the show has made time and time again. We’ve all seen post-apocalypses that ask what the survivors are willing to kill for in order to keep surviving, but asking what they’re willing to live for is a much more important question.

As a work of science fiction, the eighth and final episode of The Rain‘s first season (“Trust Your Instincts”) uses its brisk 40-minute running time to fill in a bunch of plot holes and pave the way for the stories to follow. When Simone, Rasmus, and the rest of the gang arrive at Apollon headquarters, the others are escorted into a bunker (their disgust at setting foot in yet another one is tangible) while the siblings are brought to meet their long-lost father Frederik. He tries his best to effect a rapprochement, but it’s clear from the start there’s something he’s not telling them.

When Rasmus is whisked away for treatment and testing, his dad eventually finds an opportunity to bring Simone to an unmonitored location in the bowels of the facility to tell her the truth. Yes, he knew all along that Rasmus had the immunity Apollon and its army of Strangers was seeking, but he kept his location — and, as it happens, the fact that he was alive at all — a secret because extracting the benign, curative form of the virus from Rasmus in order to produce a vaccine would kill him. Flashbacks show Frederik sneaking into the bunker for one last look at his sleeping children the night he left them behind (Rasmus did see his father after all), cordoning it off and (allegedly) shutting it down to prevent further intrusions, and eventually killing his own coworker when the man’s suspicions get the better of him. The murder makes him vomit with horror and guilt after the fact.

But that’s a reaction he soon stifles. He admits to Simone that he oversaw an untold number of deaths in which people the Strangers captured were injected with the virus to see if any of them were immune, all to prevent Rasmus from dying in their place. “You’re my children,” he says, his voice breaking. “I love you. That’s why I had to do it.” Writer Marie Østerbye runs right at one of the central moral dilemmas of violent fiction —How Far Would You Go To Protect The People You Love? — and doesn’t stack the deck in either direction. Frederik’s pain and love are real, but so were the pain and love felt by all the people he effectively murdered. Admirably, the show leaves it up to the viewer to ponder the imponderable question, instead of ladening with “hell yeah I’d do it” or making him an outright psychopath who doesn’t understand what he did was wrong.

Frederik’s plans for the family to escape are complicated, however, by the discovery that the virus in Rasmus’s blood, the one that cured him of his long-ago illness and kept him immune when Apollon released it into the atmosphere with cloud-seeding technology, has mutated. He’s still healthy and immune, but the variant he carries is lethal, not benign. The idea of letting the carrier of a completely unknown strain back out into the world proves too much for him; he wounds Martin and nearly kills Rasmus before getting decked by Simone (and kicked in the head by sweet, smiling Lea as a farewell). The group is nearly thwarted once again at the gate out of the walled-off quarantine zone, where Thomas, the relatively friendly Stranger who brought them there, informs the members of the group who aren’t the Andersen siblings that they’ve swallowed the same nanocapsule poison the Strangers and other Apollon employees have, preventing them from leaving.

Everyone encourages Simone to leave anyway, but in a truly remarkable performance by Alba August, her dismay and indecision gives way to what can only be described as a fight-or-flight response in which she does neither. Practically vibrating with energy, she steps back out of their stolen vehicle and informs her friends that she’s not going anywhere without them. (The decision to bring Rasmus despite his condition is already a done deal.) So our heroes speed off, back into the wilderness of the quarantine zone, with Apollon pursuers presumably hot on their trail. It isn’t just a vaccine they’re trying to make there, you see: Sten, the head of the company, has plans to weaponize the virus and sell it, making Rasmus’s mutated version all the more valuable.

The show’s boldest statement is the lack of violence required for the group to make this decision. They successfully face Thomas and his men down, in part because no one can risk killing Rasmus, and drive away — no exchange of gunfire, no hail of bullets, no brutal hand-to-hand combat. The Rain has depicted violence, sure, but it’s about something else. It’s about Lea’s relief upon finding her friend Jean alive and well in the Apollon bunker, and the sense of awkwardly intimate humor behind the decision to have this take place the moment he steps out of the shower, his towel falling off in surprise.

It’s about the group’s laughter when they’re together, even in the most dire circumstances. It’s about how much attention they pay to each other, and how they work to help rather than hinder one another — as a case in point, Simone advises the crew, sealed in their bunker, to cut off the oxygen flow and trigger the automatic hatch release in the same way they once used on her and Rasmus. When it is about pain, it’s often internal, as when Rasmus (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen, looking beautifully burned out by it all) reacts to news of his contagion with the devastatingly direct statement “I want it out of my body.”

Even when they suspect or believe the worst, they still center their connection to one another. At one point, Martin (Mikkel Følsgaard, who’s grown warmer and more well-rounded with each passing episode) tells Simone that even if the worst happens, he’ll at least have gotten to meet her; when he encourages her to flee from the gate and she asks what he’ll do, he says he’ll stay in the zone, then jokes “It’s not that bad” just to take the edge off things for her.

It’s not so much that The Rain breaks new ground for the postapocaptic-dystopia narrative. It’s simply that it shows how much more ground there is to explore in that great big quarantine zone of a genre. Head writer Jannik Tai Mosholt, his co-creators Christian Potalivo and Esbent Toft Jacobsen, directors Kenneth Kainz and Natasha Arthy (who helmed the finale), and the uniformly strong cast should all take a bow for pulling this off in what felt like half the total running time of other Netflix dramas. They didn’t waste a drop.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Rain Episode 8 ("Trust Your Instincts") on Netflix